Monday, March 16, 2015

For the third time in the last few years, Al Gore, founder and chairman of the Climate Reality Project, spoke at the festival on Friday. Naturally, his interactive discussion focused on addressing the climate crisis. The former vice president focused on the need to “punish climate-change deniers, saying politicians should pay a price for rejecting ‘accepted science,'” said the Chicago Tribune.

Gore said forward-thinking investors are moving away from companies that invest in fossil fuels and towards companies investing in renewable energy. “We need to put a price on carbon to accelerate these market trends,” Gore told the Chicago Tribune, referring to a proposed federal cap-and-trade system that would penalize companies that exceeded their carbon-emission limits. “And in order to do that, we need to put a price on denial in politics.”

...

The former Veep even gave a nod to Pope Francis during his talk, showing a slide of the pontiff and saying “How about this Pope?” Pope Francis celebrated his two-year anniversary as Pope on Friday, riding a wave of popularity “that has reinvigorated the Catholic Church in ways not seen since the days of St. John Paul II,” said the Chicago Tribune. Gore said he was looking forward to the Pope’s highly anticipated encyclical on the environment which is due to be released in June or July. “I’m not a Catholic,” Gore said, “but I could be persuaded to become one.”

A tiny voice tells me that hell would freeze over before Al Gore becomes Catholic but... hey... I'm open to the possibility.

Sunday, August 31, 2014

The speech by former US Vice-President Al Gore was apocalyptic. ‘The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff,’ he said. ‘It could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven years. Seven years from now.’

Those comments came in 2007 as Mr Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigning on climate change.

But seven years after his warning, The Mail on Sunday can reveal that, far from vanishing, the Arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in succession – with a surge, depending on how you measure it, of between 43 and 63 per cent since 2012.

To put it another way, an area the size of Alaska, America’s biggest state, was open water two years ago, but is again now covered by ice.

The most widely used measurements of Arctic ice extent are the daily satellite readings issued by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is co-funded by Nasa. These reveal that – while the long-term trend still shows a decline – last Monday, August 25, the area of the Arctic Ocean with at least 15 per cent ice cover was 5.62 million square kilometres.

This was the highest level recorded on that date since 2006 (see graph, right), and represents an increase of 1.71 million square kilometres over the past two years – an impressive 43 per cent.

Other figures from the Danish Meteorological Institute suggest that the growth has been even more dramatic. Using a different measure, the area with at least 30 per cent ice cover, these reveal a 63 per cent rise – from 2.7 million to 4.4 million square kilometres.

The satellite images published here are taken from a further authoritative source, the University of Illinois’s Cryosphere project.

They show that as well as becoming more extensive, the ice has grown more concentrated, with the purple areas – denoting regions where the ice pack is most dense – increasing markedly.

Crucially, the ice is also thicker, and therefore more resilient to future melting. Professor Andrew Shepherd, of Leeds University, an expert in climate satellite monitoring, said yesterday: ‘It is clear from the measurements we have collected that the Arctic sea ice has experienced a significant recovery in thickness over the past year.

‘It seems that an unusually cool summer in 2013 allowed more ice to survive through to last winter. This means that the Arctic sea ice pack is thicker and stronger than usual, and this should be taken into account when making predictions of its future extent.’

There's a lesson here. There are many who ridicule Christ's faithful, who find believers in traditional and orthodox Christianity irrational and foolish and yet would be the first to defend and promote the faith that Al Gore and his minions peddle to the gullible and easily led.

Faith is alive an well in this culture. It's what we choose believe that makes the difference.

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

And up through the ground came a bubbling greenhouse gas. Researchers have discovered 570 plumes of methane percolating up from the sea floor off the eastern coast of the United States, a surprisingly high number of seeps in a relatively quiescent part of the ocean. The seeps suggest that methane’s contribution to climate change has been underestimated in some models. And because most of the seeps lie at depths where small changes in temperature could be releasing the methane, it is possible that climate change itself could be playing a role in turning some of them on.

Most of the seeps are thought to be fed by methane stored in hydrates, crystal lattices of water ice that form under low temperatures and high pressures. Harvesting methane from hydrates in the sea floor has already aroused commercial interests; both Japan and the United States have embarked on pilot extraction projects. But the hydrates are also significant for climate scientists: This immense reservoir is thought to contain 10 times as much carbon as the atmosphere. The gas, if it reaches the atmosphere, is far more potent than carbon dioxide as a heat trapper. Even in the more likely event that aerobic microbes devour the methane while still in the ocean, it is converted to carbon dioxide, which leads to ocean acidification. Some scientists have implicated runaway methane hydrate releases in the catastrophic extinctions of marine life at the Permian-Triassic boundary, 252 million years ago.

The present study, published online today in Nature Geoscience, is based on data collected in a survey from 2011 to 2013 by the research vessel Okeanos Explorer. Equipped with a multibeam sonar along its hull, the vessel not only mapped the sea floor along a swath off the coast of North Carolina to Massachusetts, but also recorded reflections in the water column. Gas bubbles of methane stood out as a distinctive signature. Most of the seeps were found at depths of 180 to 600 meters along the upper slope of the continental margin. This is the area where the continental shelf rapidly falls to the 5000-meter-deep abyssal plain of the ocean.

“So far everybody has been looking at small spots. This is the first time anyone has systematically mapped an entire margin,” says Christian Berndt, a marine geophysicist at GEOMAR in Kiel, Germany, who was not involved in the study. It was also a surprise because seeps are typically found above known methane reservoirs, or above regions of active tectonic activity. The continental margin was thought to be virtually devoid of seeps—until scientists studied the sonar data. “They found that there was much more methane coming out than was suspected beforehand,” Berndt says.

For a handful of the seeps, the researchers were able to take pictures with a remotely operated submersible. They found carbonate rocks associated with the seeps that would have taken several thousand years to form. But some of the seeps are shallow—and are at the critical depth where hydrates fall apart—so they could be sensitive to rising ocean temperatures on much shorter time scales, says Carolyn Ruppel, a co-author of the new study and chief of the gas hydrates project at the U.S. Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “There are reasons to believe that some of the present seepage has been triggered by changes in oceanographic conditions,” she says.

Proving that climate change is directly responsible could be difficult, Berndt says. In January, he and colleagues published a study in Science on methane seeps in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of the island of Svalbard, where temperature changes are occurring more rapidly. Berndt found evidence that the seeps there had existed for at least 3000 years and saw no evidence that the ocean sediments had been heating up—and releasing methane—on the decades long timescales associated with climate change. At the very least, though, he says, the Atlantic Ocean study shows that ocean and climate modelers should start to incorporate methane inputs from many more types of seafloor terrains around the world. “We have this extra source here,” he says. “Not much attention has been paid to it.”

So... given some of what I bolded in the excerpt, and what has been said in the past by the global warmingologists, we should be able to conclude that man-made climate change, though difficult to prove, is responsible for the catastrophic extinction of marine life some 252 million years ago.

PICKING up where a high-school chemistry class might end, ''Nova,'' the public-broadcasting science series, offers the nonmatriculating viewer an advanced course in worrying. The cause of the concern is all the carbon dioxide that's being pumped into the industrialized and motorized air. The hourlong broadcast is called ''The Climate Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect,'' at 9 tonight on Channel 13.

The conclusion, conveyed with great authority by several big-league climatologists from government and private research organizations, is terrible: by the year 2000, the atmosphere and weather will grow warmer by several degrees and life - animal, plant, human - will be threatened. The experts say that melting ice caps, flooded cities, droughts in the corn belt and famine in the third world could result if the earth's mean temperature rises by a mere two or three degrees.

The documentary swings between pictures of green lands and smokestack skies. This, of course, is familiar to readers and documentary viewers, going back at least to Rachel Carson's ''Silent Spring.'' The pleasant educational lesson on ''Nova'' illustrates planetary ecology. In an interesting analogy, we learn from the writer-producer Richard Broad, of Boston's public-television station WGBH, that a single trans-Atlantic flight consumes all the energy that an acre of forest produces in 100 years. The oceans and forests absorb carbon dioxide; that's the good news. The bad news is that these natural safeguards could be imperiled if tropical forests are cut down for agricultural use.

Millions of tons of coal are burned annually around the world. In small amounts, carbon dioxide is necessary, but with the ever-growing consumption of fossil fuels (mainly coal), the air becomes polluted at an intolerable level. The scientists explain that the carbon dioxide released into the air acts like the glass in a greenhouse, sealing the earth in its own warmth - creating the ''greenhouse effect.''

Looking at the clouds of industrial smoke, and then at the crowded highways, a scientist from the National Center for Climate Research says: ''The industrialized West keeps the furnaces burning. This is the high price we pay for prosperity.'' It is a grim prognosis. The scientists on the program issue warnings but they cannot quite tell the world to stop the clock of industrialization. The advances made on antipollution devices on automobiles might be applied to cutting down industrial smoke, too.

''The Climate Crisis'' was originally produced by WGBH in 1983. It would be useful to do some re-editing, cut down a bit on the original documentary and bring it up to date, even if only with a brief new introduction or conclusion.

Hopefully you noticed that the piece is a little dated... as in... nearly 30 years old. Hopefully you also noticed that doom and gloom was supposed to have taken place, as predicted by these experts with athority, by the year 2000.

It's been nearly 15 years since that doomsday and the predictions, though still coming, continue to slip doomsday's date... with authority.

Priests in white lab coat vestments utter prophecies “with great authority”. Apocalyptic language abounds. People perpetually speak of their belief and disbelief in global warming. Indulgences called carbon credits are offered. As somebody who knows little of the science but something of the language of faith, I find it fascinating. Nobody ever asks me if I believe in hydraulics or jet propulsion.

Heh.

Mark's point is clear and is why on this blog, whenever I post anything on the myth that is man-made global warming, I put it under the category of the Church of Chicken Little.

It's the most apt and descriptive subject to put these kinds of stories under.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

If you heard someone utter that phrase today, what would you think that person might be talking about?

The ISIS threat? The humanitarian crisis at our borders? The Russia-Ukraine conflict and Vladimir Putin acting like he wants to return to the Cold War? Or maybe the Ebola out-break? The Israel-Gaza back and forth? How about threats to religious liberty? The secularization of the culture? What about the militarization of the police given what's going on in Missouri?

The global impact of climate change is “the biggest challenge of all that we face right now,” Secretary of State John Kerry told an audience in Hawaii Wednesday, putting an issue he feels passionately about at the center of a speech entitled “U.S. Vision for Asia-Pacific Engagement.”

“The science is screaming at us,” he said. “Ask any kid in school. They understand what a greenhouse is, how it works, why we call it the greenhouse effect. They get it.”

“If you accept the science,” Kerry continued. “If you accept that the science is causing climate to change, you have to heed what those same scientists are telling us about how you prevent the inevitable consequences and impacts.”

“That’s why President Obama has made climate change a top priority. He’s doing by executive authority what we’re not able to get the Congress to do.”

Kerry said climate change was not some future crisis.

“Climate change is here now. It’s happening, happening all over the world. It’s not a challenge that’s somehow remote and that people can’t grab onto.”

He cited “unprecedented storms, unprecedented typhoons, unprecedented hurricanes, unprecedented droughts, unprecedented fires, major damage, billions and billions of dollars of damage being done that we’re paying for instead of investing those billions of dollars in avoiding this in the first place.”

The speech at the East-West Center, a Honolulu-based think tank, came at the end of a trip to Asia. Kerry used it to give an assurance that Obama’s touted “pivot” – or as the administration prefers to call it, “rebalance” – to Asia has not been moved to the back-burner because of pressing crises in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Both the speech and the trip, he said, “are meant to underscore that even as we focus on those crises that I’ve just listed and on conflicts that dominate the headlines on a daily basis and demand our leadership – even as we do that, we will never forget the long-term strategic imperatives for American interests.”

The Earth’s climate is immensely complex, but the basic principle behind the “greenhouse effect” is easy to understand. The burning of oil, gas, and especially coal pumps carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere, where they allow the sun’s heat to penetrate to the Earth’s surface but impede its escape, thus causing the lower atmosphere and the Earth’s surface to warm. Essentially everybody, Lindzen included, agrees. The question at issue is how sensitive the planet is to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases (this is called climate sensitivity), and how much the planet will heat up as a result of our pumping into the sky ever more CO2, which remains in the atmosphere for upwards of 1,000 years. (Carbon dioxide, it may be needless to point out, is not a poison. On the contrary, it is necessary for plant life.)

Lindzen doesn’t deny that the climate has changed or that the planet has warmed. “We all agree that temperature has increased since 1800,” he tells me. There’s a caveat, though: It’s increased by “a very small amount. We’re talking about tenths of a degree [Celsius]. We all agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. All other things kept equal, [there has been] some warming. As a result, there’s hardly anyone serious who says that man has no role. And in many ways, those have never been the questions. The questions have always been, as they ought to be in science, how much?”

Lindzen says not much at all—and he contends that the “alarmists” vastly overstate the Earth’s climate sensitivity. Judging by where we are now, he appears to have a point; so far, 150 years of burning fossil fuels in large quantities has had a relatively minimal effect on the climate. By some measurements, there is now more CO2 in the atmosphere than there has been at any time in the past 15 million years. Yet since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the average global temperature has risen by, at most, 1 degree Celsius, or 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit. And while it’s true that sea levels have risen over the same period, it’s believed they’ve been doing so for roughly 20,000 years. What’s more, despite common misconceptions stoked by the media in the wake of Katrina, Sandy, and the recent typhoon in the Philippines, even the IPCC concedes that it has “low confidence” that there has been any measurable uptick in storm intensity thanks to human activity. Moreover, over the past 15 years, as man has emitted record levels of carbon dioxide year after year, the warming trend of previous decades has stopped. Lindzen says this is all consistent with what he holds responsible for climate change: a small bit of man-made impact and a whole lot of natural variability.

The real fight, though, is over what’s coming in the future if humans continue to burn fossil fuels unabated. According to the IPCC, the answer is nothing good. Its most recent Summary for Policymakers, which was released early this fall—and which some scientists reject as too sanguine—predicts that if emissions continue to rise, by the year 2100, global temperatures could increase as much as 5.5 degrees Celsius from current averages, while sea levels could rise by nearly a meter. If we hit those projections, it’s generally thought that the Earth would be rife with crop failures, drought, extreme weather, and epochal flooding. Adios, Miami.

It is to avoid those disasters that the “alarmists” call on governments to adopt policies reducing the amounts of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. As a result of such policies—and a fortuitous increase in natural gas production—U.S. greenhouse emissions are at a 20-year low and falling. But global emissions are rising, thanks to massive increases in energy use in the developing world, particularly in China and India. If the “alarmists” are right, then, a way must be found to compel the major developing countries to reduce carbon emissions.

But Lindzen rejects the dire projections. For one thing, he says that the Summary for Policymakers is an inherently problematic document. The IPCC report itself, weighing in at thousands of pages, is “not terrible. It’s not unbiased, but the bias [is] more or less to limit your criticism of models,” he says. The Summary for Policymakers, on the other hand—the only part of the report that the media and the politicians pay any attention to—“rips out doubts to a large extent. . . . [Furthermore], government representatives have the final say on the summary.” Thus, while the full IPPC report demonstrates a significant amount of doubt among scientists, the essentially political Summary for Policymakers filters it out.

Lindzen also disputes the accuracy of the computer models that climate scientists rely on to project future temperatures. He contends that they oversimplify the vast complexity of the Earth’s climate and, moreover, that it’s impossible to untangle man’s effect on the climate from natural variability. The models also rely on what Lindzen calls “fudge factors.” Take aerosols. These are tiny specks of matter, both liquid and solid (think dust), that are present throughout the atmosphere. Their effect on the climate—even whether they have an overall cooling or warming effect—is still a matter of debate. Lindzen charges that when actual temperatures fail to conform to the models’ predictions, climate scientists purposely overstate the cooling effect of aerosols to give the models the appearance of having been accurate. But no amount of fudging can obscure the most glaring failure of the models: their inability to predict the 15-year-long (and counting) pause in warming—a pause that would seem to place the burden of proof squarely on the defenders of the models.

Lindzen also questions the “alarmist” line on water vapor. Water vapor (and its close cousin, clouds) is one of the most prevalent greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. According to most climate scientists, the hotter the planet gets, the more water vapor there will be, magnifying the effects of other greenhouse gases, like CO2, in a sort of hellish positive feedback loop. Lindzen disputes this, contending that water vapor could very well end up having a cooling effect on the planet. As the science writer Justin Gillis explained in a 2012 New York Times piece, Lindzen “says the earth is not especially sensitive to greenhouse gases because clouds will react to counter them, and he believes he has identified a specific mechanism. On a warming planet, he says, less coverage by high clouds in the tropics will allow more heat to escape to space, countering the temperature increase.”

If Lindzen is right about this and global warming is nothing to worry about, why do so many climate scientists, many with résumés just as impressive as his, preach imminent doom? He says it mostly comes down to the money—to the incentive structure of academic research funded by government grants. Almost all funding for climate research comes from the government, which, he says, makes scientists essentially vassals of the state. And generating fear, Lindzen contends, is now the best way to ensure that policymakers keep the spigot open.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

"If the planet is warming, why have temperatures been steady for a decade?"

That question is now the go-to counterpoint for global-warming skeptics, and it has long been a sticking point for scientists as they try to explain their climate conclusions to an increasingly polarized public.

The debate was reborn anew last week when a leaked draft of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change upcoming report conceded that warming has largely paused over the past decade, prompting outcry from skeptics and leading conservative news outlets (including Fox News) to play up the pause in their reporting.

"There has been a slowdown or hiatus in the rate of change of global temperature in the 21st century, and that's real," says David Gutzler, an earth- and planetary-sciences professor at the University of New Mexico who contributed to the IPCC report. "Most of us think that this is probably a temporary hiatus as opposed to a cessation of global warming."

...

It's all really, really complicated

Climate models incorporate vast numbers of dynamic factors, everything from melting permafrost in Russia to coal development in China to deforestation in the Amazon. Scientists are still scrambling to provide a more nuanced understanding of what global warming will look like. Indeed, many of the forces that checked warming over the past decade may accelerate it in years to come.

Within that butterfly-effect-like chaos, Gutzler said it's possible that the predictive climate models scientists use are partially wrong—not about the fact that the planet is warming, but about how, when, and where that warming will occur.

"Just like weather, once you get a month or two out, individual events are unpredictable, like decadal events are unpredictable," he said.

Yes... it's all so complicated and unpredictable they say... while they simplistically predict doom and gloom.

I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, hey man, we don’t go for that anymore. The same thing happened on apartheid. The same thing happened on the nuclear arms race with the freeze movement. The same thing happened in an earlier era with abolition. A few months ago, I saw an article about two gay men standing in line for pizza and some homophobe made an ugly comment about them holding hands and everyone else in line told them to shut up. We’re winning that conversation.

The conversation on global warming has been stalled because a shrinking group of denialists fly into a rage when it’s mentioned. It’s like a family with an alcoholic father who flies into a rage every time a subject is mentioned and so everybody avoids the elephant in the room to keep the peace. But the political climate is changing. Something like Chris Hayes’s excellent documentary on climate change wouldn’t have made it on TV a few years ago. And as I said, many Republicans who’re still timid on the issue are now openly embarrassed about the extreme deniers. The deniers are being hit politically. They’re being subjected to ridicule, which stings. The polling is going back up in favor of doing something on this issue. The ability of the raging deniers to stop progress is waning every single day.

When that conversation is won, you’ll see more measures at the local and state level and less resistance to what the EPA is doing. And slowly it will become popular to propose steps that go further and politicians that take the bit in their teeth get rewarded. I remember when the tide turned on smoking in public places. People thought the late Frank Lautenburg was crazy for proposing a ban on smoking in airplanes, but he was rewarded politically and then politicians began falling all over themselves to do the same. That’s the optimistic scenario. And it’s not just a scenario! It’s happening now!

That should be a clarion call to freedom lovers and lovers of the truth the world over.

The other side has abandoned science and now resort to name calling, guilt mongering and other deceptive means to convince us of a lie.

Tuesday, April 02, 2013

James E. Hansen, the nation’s most outspoken scientist on global warming, is stepping down from his
federal post to engage full time in activism on the issue.

Hansen, who heads NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York City, spent 46 years working at the agency.

After warning Congress in 1988 that climate change posed a serious threat to the planet, he has spent much of the past quarter-century trying to persuade policymakers to take bold action to curb global carbon emissions.

In an e-mail Monday, Hansen wrote that he decided to step down “so that I can spend full time on science, drawing attention to the implications for young people, and making clear what science says needs to be done.”

The New York Times first reported the news of Hansen’s retirement Monday night.

Climate activist Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, said Han­sen, 72, decided to step down so he could engage in lawsuits and protests full time. Han­sen was arrested in February in Washington in a protest against the Keystone XL pipeline plan. He participated in the demonstration on a day off from his government job.

Hansen has frequently tangled with his superiors in the federal government, especially during the George W. Bush administration. At one point, political appointees barred Han­sen from talking directly to the press.

“When the history of our time is written, he’s going to be one of the giants,” McKibben said in an interview. “If anyone has ever served his country well, it’s Jim Hansen, to work that long in the same shop and to do it under that kind of pressure and scrutiny, and to do it with that kind of faithfulness.”

Faithfulness indeed.

Global warming has become a religion and Hansen has been the religion's taxpayer subsidized great high priest... but no more.

Apparently someone decided wisely that the notion of separation between church and state should be taken more seriously by the good reverend and forced him out.

Moments earlier, before an ad break, she segued from the Northeast blizzard to a segment with Bill Nye
“the science guy,” by pointing to global warming: “Every time we see a storm like this lately, the first question to pop into a lot of people’s minds is whether or not global warming is to blame? I’ll talk to Bill Nye, ‘the science guy,’ about devastating storms and climate change.”

She never got to that question in the subsequent interview at about 3:25 PM EST during CNN Newsoom, instead transitioning from a snowfall update: “Talk about something else that’s falling from the sky and that is an asteroid. What’s coming our way? Is this an effect of, perhaps, of global warming or is this just some meteoric occasion?”

Mr. Nye, the piece goes on to report, failed to address the question.

I frankly have thought for a good while that male pattern baldness was caused by global warming.